I was
fortunate to attend kari edwards’ book launch of hir book, iduna (O Books, 2003) at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco. Kevin Killian introduced kari
and here are some of my notes from his introduction (my notes are scattered and
my handwriting bathetic so assume such caveats):

”...iduna extends kari's range -- of
gender confusion....gut-splittingly funny when it wants to be; mystical when it
wants to be....[challenges preconceived] ideas on heroism, kindness and
lucidity...”

I share Kevin’s notes as I didn’t have much notes of my own -- and because I think
Kevin's notion of how kari's work challenges preconceived ideas on heroism,
kindness and lucidity is as fabulous a summation as can be made about iduna’s vision.

But the reason I ended upnot taking
notes (which I often like to do at poetry readings) is that I got lost, at one
point, into the rhythm of kari’s words.kari
is a great reader and performer: my eyes noted with much appreciation the
occasional rolling of hir shoulders as hir words affected hir body....and in
that voluntary loss to rhythm, I mentally returned to one of my own poems and
ended up rewriting -- and improving -- its ending. For me, an elemental proof
of other writers inspiring me is when their work moves me back to my own acts
with fresh eyes because of what those writers taught.

I allowed myself the brief distraction to mentally revise my own poem because
in the 15 or so minutes of sitting there at the SPT auditorium waiting for the reading
to start, I'd already inhaled (so effortlessly!) iduna which I bought by the entrance desk. As soon as I opened the
first page, I dived -- it was a helpless action as I was swiftly entranced by
both the imagery as well as words. iduna is not just a revolutionary poetic
text but a revolutionary way of presenting the book.

In iduna, each page transforms itself
into skin – specifically (to my eyes), tattooed flesh. The verses are
presented, but each page is no longer a one-dimensional field. Each page has
become a layered space through a backdrop of other text printed in lighter
tones; the background marks creates layers to evoke depth from what is usually
the flatness of a page.

But the space is not "white space" -- it is the mussed up space of
flesh that's shown a lot of living: wrinkles, scars, bruises, love marks,
orgasmic stains, lost teeth, calluses and so on. Visually dizzy, such that as
one continues entering this *book* it was absolutely LOGICAL that the verses
sometimes would be presented on their sides or upside down, rather than top to
bottom. That, too, is a smart strategy -- by compelling the reader to
manipulate the book (to reverse it or turn it sideways), the book provides a
reason for physical engagement (as with touching flesh) instead of just reading
words.

When I first saw Kevin that evening, he joked affectionately, "Have you
read iduna? I can't even see it; it
makes me dizzy."

The book is indeed dizzying...but with a center of calm so that one ends up, as
a result of reading it, more learned -- which is to say, more lucid. How many
authors can lead you into their works and release you as a much less blinded
being?

But the
visual in iduna is not privileged --
read the words and they are still masterful in ways that text is
(conventionally) judged. This poem, for instance, upends even as it pays homage
to lyricism:

the
hand that commits the most

I sit in those that would swim past a nobody morse code

there is harm dropping against the wall and blue screams

surround arithmetic beforehands

it is worth noting (not in any order): turquoise manners, deafen glass, and
those tiny humming

it's vowel time now and my opponents arrive -- we form exploding tongue ruts

a contortionist shifts red, the light
backs up, an engine glares –

the sea crumbles dawn –

hard known tips labor in consequence –

I notice a tumbling down, a tumbling down
-- at half mast, as when one is indecisive in the

advances of lawn care.

upon approaching the sea I think carefully and then as before –

off-color sights arrive in their appointed side lock feelings,

the margin sits and I sit in the
margin.

we envelop blank falls, out of an amassing cache of unassigned sins, sodomy
lights my cathode-

ray tube, the jury sweeps by in a
cause and effect maneuver –

"what we have . . . is . . . . . form . . ."

*****

When I
first began writing the first draft of this review, I synchronistically saw one
of hir e-mails in which kari wrote:

“REVOLUTIONARY LIVING, REVOLUTIONARY
LANGUAGE
revolutionary living is an act of living in a rolling thunder of questions;
poetic language can be an act of revolution; there is no act but acting that is
repetitive and preformatted, a repeatable act is a conmodification of the body;
there is a living revolution in poetic language that is a continuum...their is
a question that questions the question and folds in on itself... there is
veggie dogs and a bun for 2.98 at Sam dogs at 28th and Broadway.... // p. or
both,”

The
revolution. What I appreciate about kari is how hir activities as a gender
activist becomes integrated into hir words. The writing may or may not be
fiction. But it is truth because, first, something was lived before it showed
up in the telling. In fact, in another reading, kari would call the
presentation of hir book “queer.”Well, iduna extends poetic tradition by not
sticking to convention, particularly since, before a revolution, words have
constrained gender.Yet though this book
is “queer”, it is not alien.Because iduna manifests poetry, it is entirely
natural: “what we have [indeed] is form.”

Here's one more from kari, a poem whose fabulous title is from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner:

have
you ever retired a human

take a deep breath

turn the sky into a bite sized ball

swallow

imagine all the filth of time

the screams from war

blood shed particles

lost memories of genocide

exhaust, fumes, vapors and particles
from every motor, coal furnace, and nuclear reactor

the bones that have been crushed in machines by machines or become machines

all the hate and violence caused by fear times 1 million and fifty-five

isolation and madness in the upper atmosphere

each and every cry from the last of a kind each and every ten billion

greed and the road paved with good intentions

take a deep breath

swallow

*****

I saw kari at another of her readings a few weeks before finishing this
review.At that reading, she read from iduna by simply reading the titles in
the book’s (Table of) Contents.It
worked.It works in the same way Page 96
offers a “poem” through the image of a black square created through dense ink
writing in the midst of the page -- that black square contains a meaning even
as it is (except for its square-ness) an undefined image abstracted from text.It’s worth noting that the edges to the
square are not cleanly lined – of course not.The edges remain edges even as they do not proscribe constraints, e.g.
through linearity or through evoking a box that contains.

That the
book’s Contents -- like Page 96’s black square -- presents an effective poem testifies to how kari’s iduna grasps the nature of Poetry, at
least its nature for me: that Poetry is not about words but about what inspired
the words and then what those words subsequently inspire.Some may call that revolution from and of the
word.I would call it, “In the
beginning, there was….”